A Sybil attack means an attack against a peer-to-peer governance system by a single entity creating a multitude of false identities a.k.a. sock puppets to circumvent limitations on the level of influence a single identity can have.
People have been wondering why a single account can vote for 30 witnesses. Wouldn't the system be more decentralized if one account could vote only for a much smaller number of witnesses. Then one entity would have less influence on witness voting regardless of how much stake they have?
No. It does not work that way because it's easy to create as many accounts as needed to circumvent any such limitations by dividing one's stake among those accounts.
With the Economic Improvement Proposal a non-linear convergent curve was introduced to curb low-level vote farming. What it does is tax the combined reward shares of those posts that have their sum of rewards shares on them below a certain threshold. Thanks to the curve, it is much less feasible to fly under the radar and automatically generate placeholder posts and vote on them with little voting power. That makes the work of abuse fighters easier.
What if a non-linear curve of some kind were to be applied to witness votes? What if large votes were disproportionally favored at the expense of small votes? But wouldn't that screw over the little guy? No, it wouldn't if small votes could be grouped together to form larger voting blocs for the purposes of vote weight calculations.
Suppose there were 20 consensus witness spots and one account could only vote on one witness. Go around that limitation by creating 20 sock puppets and vote using them? Sorry. The curve punishes you unless you vote through a proxy as a single unit.
Wouldn't this still encourage stake-splitting by large stakeholders as in many cases voting on only one witness would mean wasting voting power? This system could be fine-tuned by allowing the dividing one's voting weight across many witnesses from one account. In that case, only one full-weight vote per witness per account would be allowed without non-linear punishment.
Any comments?